Jmol

Jmol   is a free, open-source molecular visualization software package. Its applet is the primary visualization software used in Proteopedia. Jmol is a cross-platform program written in java, and is available either as a stand-alone application, or as a web browser applet.

The Jmol applet is also used in Molecular Workbench and in scientific journals.

For more information and downloads, please see Jmol.Org.

Use in Scientific Journals
Jmol is used in traditional scientific journals in three main ways. 

Interactive 3D Complement pages in Proteopedia. Authors of scientific journal publications, working in collaboration with a dedicated team in Proteopedia, develop rich interactive pages that complement their journal paper, making its structural aspects more comprehensible to a wider audience. See examples at Interactive 3D Complements.

 Interactive 3D figures. Following the lead set by Protein Science with Kinemages in the early 1990's, figures in scientific journal articles have been implemented in Jmol so they can be rotated, etc. This involves manual implementation of each figure, a laborious task requiring a person knowledgeable in Jmol programming. Probably the first instance was in November, 2006, in ACS Chemical Biology, and subsequently in June, 2007, in Biochemical Journal with interactive 3D figures in Jmol implemented by Frieda Reichsman. Authoring of these interactive 3D figures remains time consuming, and only about a dozen articles have been so illustrated as of early 2010 (listed at Reichsman's site MoleculesInMotion.Com). In 2008, the International Union of Crystallography developed a toolkit to facilitate the authoring of interactive figures in Jmol in their journals. Outstanding examples are in the 2010 article by Robert M. Hanson (principal author of Jmol after 2005) Jmol – a paradigm shift in crystallographic visualization, as well as in a talk given by him in early 2011 at the ICSTI Workshop. In 2009, Protein Science began using this technology.

 FirstGlance in Jmol is used by several journals for interactive 3D display and exploration of newly published macromolecular structures. Typically, a link labeled 3D View appears in the online journal articles and contents. The first journal to do this was Nature Structural and Molecular Biology in February, 2006, and others, including Nature, soon followed -- see Adoptions of FirstGlance in Jmol.  

See also:
 * Proteopedia:Supplementary materials
 * Journals using Jmol.

Command Scripting Language
Jmol has an extensive and powerful command language that specifies molecular scenes. A molecular scene consists of the rendering or display for each part of the molecular model (e.g. ribbon cartoon, ball and stick, etc.), optionally hiding some parts of the model, the color or color scheme for each moiety, optional labels (attached to an atom) or signs (text in fixed locations), and the orientation and zoom (magnification) of the molecule. Jmol's command language is a superset of the RasMol and Chime command languages.

A command script or simply script is a series of commands recorded in a file. Script files are plain text, and their filenames end with .spt.

Proteopedia's Scene Authoring Tools free Proteopedia users from the burden of learning Jmol's command language, by enabling them to author complex molecular scenes from menus, buttons, checkboxes and forms. Further, Proteopedia saves customized molecular scenes in the form of state scripts.

For advanced users who wish to use Jmol commands, instructions are provided:
 * Using Jmol commands in the applet
 * Using Jmol commands in the application

State Scripts
Jmol has the capability to generate a command script that will recreate whatever molecular scene it is currently displaying, including all details and the orientation of the molecule. Proteopedia uses this capability to save scenes created with its Scene Authoring Tools so they can be displayed in its web pages and thereby easily shared.

A state script recreates a single molecular scene, possibly including an animation among multiple models (when the PDB file contains more than one model -- see Morphs). Each green link in Proteopedia runs a state script in Jmol, recreating a single scene.

Complex Animations
In addition to the straightforward animations and/or Morphs which were mentioned in the previous paragraph and that can be specified in the Scene authoring tools, more complex animations, typically involving timed transitions between multiple scenes, can also be played in Proteopedia. Examples are may be seen at Molecular Playground/Tamiflu and Molecular Playground/HIV Protease Inhibitor. Command scripts for complex animations must be authored by hand by someone familiar with Jmol's command language. The resulting script file(s) are then uploaded to Proteopedia. Uploaded scripts are not played by typical green scene links, but can be played from buttons (see the above-linked examples) or text linked to the script that looks like the typical Proteopedia green scene links, as described here.

Loading Pages with Custom Versions of the Jmol applet
Advanced users may wish to load a Proteopedia page with a version of the Jmol applet other than the currently used version. Testing new versions of the Jmol applet in Proteopedia or running the signed applet in order to save an image file in the local drive would involve running such custom versions.

To load a page with a custom version of the Jmol applet, in your browser's address bar, immediately after the normal Proteopedia page URL, paste code that is similar to below pointing at the files for the chosen version of the Jmol applet. The normal Proteopedia page URL in this example is ' http://proteopedia.org/wiki/index.php/1stp '.

EXAMPLE CODE TO PASTE AFTER A TYPICAL PROTEOPEDIA PAGE URL IN THE ADDRESS BAR: ?JMOLJAR=http://chemapps.stolaf.edu/jmol/docs/examples-11/JmolAppletSigned0.jar

Resulting example of the URL in your browser's address bar of: http://proteopedia.org/wiki/index.php/1stp?JMOLJAR=http://chemapps.stolaf.edu/jmol/docs/examples-11/JmolAppletSigned0.jar

Please note that although URLs, such as ' http://www.proteopedia.org/wiki/index.php/1stp ', will work to load a normal Proteopedia page, you cannot have 'www.' in front of 'proteopedia.org' for URLs where you want to load custom Jmol versions.